The London Train by Tessa Hadley Read Free Book Online

Paddington a few weeks ago. Her hair was tied in the same low-slung bunches on her shoulders, and this had the effect he remembered from that day, reminding him of girls in gritty Sixties films about the British working classes, with some wornness and marks of trouble on their young faces already, part of their sex appeal. Pia’s hair was clean, but her face was pale and not made up; she was wrapped in a shabby black cardigan with its belt dangling loose, which she kept in place, folding her arms over it. She looked years older than when he’d last seen her, when they went out to eat together and he was still thinking of her as a child. Although she might have been trying to cover herself up, he saw in his first glance that she was pregnant. Not hugely pregnant, but enough for it to show up against her angular thinness. He wouldn’t have seen it when he saw her on the platform in the Underground because there had been people standing in front of her.
    He couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t thought of this, any of them.
    Pia was shyly anxious, managing her father’s entrance through a prison-like sequence of heavy metal doors, grim stairwells. Chattering, covering up her nerves, she told him how this council block had been notorious in the Eighties for its drug users and its crime, and how it had been cleaned up in the Nineties, equipped with a security fence and a concierge entrance. Nothing was said yet about the pregnancy, though when Paul kissed her he felt the alien hard lump of it against him. She might even believe he hadn’t noticed it. He was embarrassed about how to begin, he was waiting until they had arrived somewhere and were properly alone. They stopped at a red-painted door, off a narrow concrete walkway two floors up. Pia had her keys in her cardigan pocket: just before she opened the door she whispered urgently to him, putting her mouth close to his ear.
    – Remember, you promised not to tell anyone about all this.
    It wasn’t the moment to protest that the promise had been exacted without his understanding the full circumstances. They stepped through a narrow hall space into a small living room, with windows all along one wall. Slatted blinds were drawn down, so that the light was dim, pierced by shafts of white brilliance here and there where the slats were broken or twisted. A big flat-screen television was switched on to twenty-four-hour news, a bed made up on a sofa had been slept in, but not tidied. The whole flat smelled of stale bedding, of cigarettes and strongly of marijuana. A door was ajar into what must be a bedroom, which was also dark: the bathroom and a kitchenette about as big as a cupboard opened off the hall. The bathroom door was off its hinges, balanced against the wall.
    – It’s a bit of a mess, said Pia, as if she’d noticed for the first time.
    She began picking up mugs and plates from the floor.
    Paul was thinking that he must rescue her from here, it wasn’t a fit place for his daughter’s baby to be developing. He was about to say something about this when a man stepped out from the bedroom.
    – This is Marek, Pia said. – This is my dad.
    Marek held out his hand.
    When he guessed that Pia must be living with a boyfriend, Paul’s imagination had supplied someone her own age, more like James Willis, or perhaps a fellow student who had dropped out from the university; he had not ever pictured an adult. This man wasn’t big, he was medium height with a slight build, but there was nothing boyish or incomplete about him. His slimness seemed packed tight with an energy and authority Paul was not at all prepared for. His hair was dark and curling, cut close to his skull like a tight cap of lambswool: in the dim light he looked at least thirty. He squeezed Paul’s fingers in a hard, quick hand and then dropped them; in his other hand he was balancing tobacco along a Rizla paper. Finishing rolling it, he licked the paper in a quick accustomed movement, then offered tobacco